Thursday, 27 July 2017

Media Quotes of the Week: From Prince William blasts paparazzi, beauty and the Beeb and where have all the working class journalists gone?

Prince William on ITV's 'Diana, Our Mother: Her Life and Legacy' about the paparazzi: "If you are the Princess of Wales and you're a mother, I don't believe being chased by 30 guys on motorbikes who block your path, who spit at you to get a reaction from you… and make a woman cry in public to get a photograph, I don't believe that is appropriate. I sadly remember most of the time she ever cried about anything was to do with press intrusion. Harry and I, we had to live through that."

Rosamund Urwin in the London Evening Standardon BBC pay: "Scrutinise the list, and the whiff of sexism becomes a stench. The best-paid women — brilliant broadcasters though they are — are mostly beautiful. The men? No lookers in the top seven."

Janice Turner in The Times [£]: "Whenever a newsroom is portrayed on TV or film they make the journalists far too good-looking. We are not by and large an attractive industry. (I mean print medium here: a tighter filter operates in TV.)...It helps to remember that when people say politics is show business for ugly people many of them began as hacks."

Rod Liddle in the Sunday Times [£]: "We are not remunerated purely on the basis of the good we do in society, otherwise I’d get 20 times what Polly Toynbee earns."

Private Eye on that Impress ruling against Byline: "A system cooked up by a cross-party agreement, imposed at enormous public expense and intended as a universal system which would finally give the public confidence in self-regulation by the national press, has ended up with a white elephant overseeing arcane personal squabbles among a tiny, incestuous circle at loggerheads over the very subject of press regulation itself. Trebles all round."

Peter Veron in the Columbia Journalism Review on ex-White house press secretary Sean Spicer: "The temptation is to view Spicer as a tragic, beleaguered figure, placed in an untenable position by a boss who demanded absolute loyalty. Don’t do it. Spicer proved on his first full day in office that he had no qualms about defending an ultimately meaningless falsehood. For six months, he presided over a communications team that actively undermined the work of the press."

The Times [£] in a leader: "It has taken four years for The Times, together with the Oxford Mail, to secure the right to identify a millionaire businessman named in evidence in a landmark child sex grooming trial in which five men were jailed for life. This has been a battle not only to assert the rights of a free press but also to fulfil its duties to the public. It has taken so long because lawyers for the businessman, Tariq Khuja, have argued at the High Court, the Court of Appeal and the Supreme Court that his right to privacy under the European Convention on Human Rights outweighed any public interest in the fact that he was arrested in connection with this case and mentioned several times at the trial."

Mike Gilson in chapter from a new book Brexit, Trump and the Media, edited by Tor Clark, Neil Fowler and John Mair, serialised onHoldTheFrontPage: "Journalists often joke they got into the trade because they were poor at mathematics but even we can work out that the loss of 8,000 jobs since 2008 and the need to feed multi-platforms at the same time has seriously damaged the ability to properly rather than superficially cover the patch. The democratic deficit caused by journalism’s crisis is not just a neat phrase. It is real and, for me, it played a part in the degradation of debate, whatever side you were on, that we saw in the run up to June 23 last year."

Lewis Goodall, SKY News political correspondent, says analysis of the BBC pay list shows 45% of the Corporation's best paid stars went to private schools: "We're supposed to be the ones who find and tell the stories that matter to our audiences, and for the BBC, all of its licence fee payers. How are we supposed to do that if we are drawn from an increasingly narrow social caste? Maybe, just maybe, if we had more kids in journalism who grew up in tower blocks, we'd have been better at shining a light on the living conditions of some of our fellow citizens, like those who lived and died in Grenfell Tower. Or we would be less disposed to the curse of group think which has led journalists to call it wrong time after time in recent years, whether it be Corbyn, Trump or Brexit."

Newsnight's diplomatic correspondent Mark Urban @MarkUrban01on Twitter:‏1/Lots of discussion today about opportunities in UK journalism, class and privilege. Some observations from 30+ years in TV & papers...2/ A double whammy of London rents/property prices & falling real wages is a big factor helping those with money to go for entry level jobs...3/ Opportunity has declined steeply - Newsnight day desk had three times as many junior producers in 1980s than now, papers it's even worse..4/ as anyone trying to get a foothold in journalism will tell you,unpaid internships, & exploitative short term contracts are new normal now.

About Me

I am a freelance journalist based in the UK and was deputy editor of Press Gazette, the journalists' magazine, from 1993 until 2006. I want to give an independent view on media matters.
You can contact me with stories, ideas and comments by email at jon.slattery369@btinternet.com You can also follow me on Twitter @jonslattery